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Sunfest 2015: Fireworks guru: ‘We like to blow stuff up’

Manufacturing fireworks shows large and small around the country brings smiles not only to the crowds watching the colors in the skies, but the technicians lighting them.

“That’s the reason most of us who do this stay in it, the enjoyment we get out of it,” explains Michael Walden, pyrotechnician and vice president of Tennessee’s Pyro Shows, again responsible for the closing fireworks show at SunFeston Sunday at 9 p.m.

“And the fact that we like to blow stuff up doesn’t hurt.”

Fireworks at Sunfest 2014.

That’s OK, because the thousands of festivalgoers who will be crowded on and around the Flagler Drive waterfront to see the show like seeing stuff blown up, specifically the shells launched from a barge on the Intracoastal Waterway. Walden’s company has done the show at SunFest “off and on” for the last decade or so, “and for the third or fourth year in a row. It’s one of those festivals that is unique in the fact that most don’t live to be as old as SunFest is.”

In its 47 years in business, Pyro Shows has done it all, from the U.S. to the Middle East to Europe, at the Super Bowl and the Washington Monument. They’ve done every type of show — “You name it, we’ve pretty much done it. We’ve been asked to put people’s ashes in fireworks. We’ve done weddings and wakes, and one man wanted us to do a show to celebrate his divorce,” says Walden, whose been doing this for 23 years. “SunFest is always exciting. The venue is just unbelievably beautiful and the great thing is that we try to mix it up every year. This year is no different. We changed the look.”

The show, once again, is sponsored by 98.7 The Gater, and features “one of the better soundtracks,” an eclectic mix that veers creatively from country to rock to pop and R&B, from the Rolling Stones to Meghan Trainor to Justin Timberlake to Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. Walden says they “work with the folks at SunFest to come up with it. We have an in-house producer that sits here and produces fireworks music year-round.”

As for the fireworks themselves, he teases that “something cool happens before (the show) even starts, and then there are really cool things that are new and improved, technically advanced. Then there are staples that all look forward to, like butterflies and hearts and different patterned shells … It’s exciting to be a part of something traditional, that’s part of South Florida. It’s a tribute to the folks there.”